This is my personal blog for tracking my hobby programming development. Any opinions expressed here do not represent my employer in any way.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Progress update for 7/28/12 - 8/3/12

This week:

Coming back from my last vacation for the month, I crammed a lot of work into the last two days of the competition (the 30th and 31st). Below is a short list of things that got done:

Created a bad, but topical, main menu screen.

Created new enemies: Squid and Miniboss Squid

My roommate added behavior for the BallRusher enemy and I ended up tweaking it a bit

I also leveraged existing logic into getting the Squid and Miniboss Squid some AI patterns. They aren't great, but they'll do.

Added more enemy placement throughout the level

Wrote entirely new logic for Squid enemies, the miniboss can deal with having the old logic.

Fixed some miscellaneous bugs relating to animation and enemies facing the right direction.

Added some music that I got from www.freemusicarchive.org

Added support for respawn points.

About an hour and a half before the deadline, I started adding the boss battle for our only level.

My roommate added a credits screen.

I added a fireball sprite for the boss

Added the music attributions to the credit screen

Slapped together the entry form for our game and submitted it with about ten minutes to spare.

Submitted a patch the next morning because it turns out in my exhausted rush to get this done, I fucked up something simple with the respawn support, so you could crash the game by dying in the first 5 screens.

So the game is in a good state now, but I'm totally wiped out from the constant "go go go" of the contest, so I'm relaxing a bit for a few days and prototyping a different game before I continue work on Balzac. What will likely happen is this coming week I'll spend my time polishing and fixing bugs that I saw but didn't have time to deal with in July and then I'll release the first level as a sort of demo for the game. Hopefully that will make up for the lack of screenshots this week.